I am so glad I found this thread. It is maddening that Amazon has removed a very basic functionality that I have to believe millions of people used. I chatted and called Amazon three times and got remarkably unsatisfying answers with vague commitments that the functionality will return. It is now mid-September; I last created a report successfully on August 1st.
We buy a ton of stuff in our household through Amazon. It is a walled garden-- I’m sufficiently irritated by this loss of functionality that if I had another similar service available I’d switch services. I will try the “Privacy Central” approach that @Ghopper21 suggested and others have used. However I have a sneaking suspicion that it will not work well given the frequency of our orders, which have only increased as we’ve been stuck at home during the pandemic.
@eslimko
After going thru about 5 different amazon support techs I finally got to someone with an answer as to what happened. Amazon removed this feature from personal accounts. In order to get the feature back you need to convert your personal account to a business account.
This process removes prime video, pantry, fresh etc. You will need a separate account for those items. I didn’t want to but because I make so many purchases for work I didn’t want to deal with their garbage orders page where you can’t even search by a dollar amount which blows my mind. Having to reconcile 60-100 amazon purchases a month I had no choice but to switch.
Changing from Amazon Prime to Amazon Prime Business has no effect on your Audible account at least.
@susandennis Holy cow. I can’t wait to see mine. That is nuts. I have probably about 10 lines of history with amazon. Can’t wait to see the total.
@randy , it looks like others have reported now that Amazon is saying this feature isn’t coming back. Does that mean you’d be able to modify the parser to handle the format of the download from privacy central? Thanks.
@jayrodathome
Well, I give you credit. I went digging with Amazon at least three different occasions and didn’t get the answer you found. I also don’t like the answer… we’re heavy users of prime video and I’m very irritated at now needing a separate account if I were to switch to Amazon Prime Business.
I hope the Privacy Central thing will work out but I have my doubts on the “friendliness” of this approach.
Thanks for sharing the headers, @kraig. I put those into the rules engine earlier and I’m having more trouble than expected for a few reasons:
There are a number of fields we used to published (as a nice to have) that are no longer present.
There is no line-item total in the report. It needs to be generated by adding item cost, tax & shipping. Generally this would be easy but the import rules files are a whole different animal.
When I run the importer on 20 years of Amazon history, it says there are no new purchases (an unexpected bug).
This isn’t to say it can’t be done… it absolutely can… but it will take a bit longer than I hoped.
thanks for this link. I don’t have the transaction history file yet, but it looks promising despite the time commitment.
Data Request Confirmation
We’ve received and are processing your request to access your personal data.
We will provide your information to you as soon as we can. Usually, this should not take more than a month. In exceptional cases, for example if a request is more complex or if we are processing a high volume of requests, it might take longer, but if so we will notify you that there will be a delay.
I actually just received my Privacy Central report which has got transactions going back to 1997. Do I need to import this differently that I have previously? (I’ll remove the first 20 years of transactions, clearly.) Or should I wait until @randy has worked out his rules engine?
@heather, you’re not provided a method to select a date range, or even just the order history for that matter. AFAICT It’s basically a full GDPR/CCPA type of request. I imagine its not a very optimized process on Amazon’s backend either, considering how long it takes.
The good new is that I’ve just posted an update to the Import CSV Line Items workflow that (mostly) works for the new Amazon Privacy Central CSV file. You will need to reload your browser tab to get the freshly-updated version of the Tiller Money Labs add-on that can run the new workflow.
The (very bad) news is… the more time I spend with the new format, the more I hate it. I have documented the many issues with this significant service downgrade in this topic.
TL;DR… The new format sometimes lacks key pricing fields making the import workflow lossy— possibly lossy enough to be unusable. Again, read more here if you want the details.
I think there may be some math we can use within the import workflow to leverage more dependable pricing fields, but I’m afraid the code modifications are then non-trivial and will require more time.
Sorry to not have a better solution, but Amazon has really crippled the order history that is available to customers.
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Actually, I’m pulling the new rule down for a bit. I just realized a problem with the way I mapped the fields. Sorry for the false start…
@randy
I appreciate the work you are putting forth to making this work. I recently received my Privacy Central report and I’d like to process all of our August purchases, but I’m going to wait until you release your updated workflow.
Years ago, Amazon maintained an e-mail address jeff@amazon.com that the man himself actually read for complaints. I don’t know if the company still treats e-mails to that address as seriously as they once did but I will send an e-mail there with a complaint on this topic. In my 23 years of using Amazon, this is by far the most frustrating experience I have had.
I’m getting closer on this but, after changing the importer and comparing to my personal transactions, I keep finding my assumptions about the CSV contents are wrong around pricing.
The report provides these price values:
Price
Price Tax
Shipping Charge
Item Subtotal
Item Subtotal Tax
The report’s Price field appears to be the unit price and must be multiplied by Quantity to render the cost for that line item.
I was surprised the the amount paid is just Price and not Price + Price Tax— essentially, the Price field includes Price Tax.
I thought that the Item Subtotal would be the Price multiplied by the Quantity for a given product. Strangely, Item Subtotal seems to include other items on the same order… so it cannot be used as part of the line-item price (i.e. it is useless).
Given what I know now, my plan is to:
Leverage the Shipping Charge in the line-item total as it appears to be discrete for each line item (i.e. not a blanket shipping charge for all items in the order)
Use (Price * Quantity) + Shipping Charge for the Tiller-spreadsheet Amount field
Ignore Price Tax as I believe it is included in Price
Assume that coupons, discounts and gift cards are somehow addressed in the Price field— honestly, there is not a lot to work with here if the price calculation is complex
I appreciate what you said, @eslimko. I think it is best to wait a bit longer for some data that is mapped more intelligently. I think I’m getting close.
As someone who has spent considerable time building reports, dashboards, and trying to derive general intelligence from the AWS Cost & Usage Report, I can confirm that ambiguity, inconsistency, and fudge factors are a hallmark of Amazon CSV reporting.
Making headway this morning. I’m pretty comfortable at this point with the quality of the Amazon reporting— excepting coupons, discounts & gift cards which I have no data to use for testing.
The only thing delaying publishing is that I had to heavily rework the guts of the importer— it’s much more sophisticated now!— and I need to test with the other supported file formats to make sure I didn’t break something unintentionally.
Alright… new solution is published to help Tiller Money customers get their Amazon data so they can use our Line-item CSV importer and get back to breaking out their Amazon spending.
Earlier in this thread, I flagged a missing data issue that resulted in lost line items. I’m satisfied that that issue is resolved by using different fields— I do not believe this version will drop transactions.
I recommend reloading your spreadsheet browser tab to ensure you pull down the new version of the add-on.
Please let me know if you encounter any discrepancies, crashes or other issues.
Thanks for your patience with this.
P.S. The changes have the potential to affect other importer workflows (e.g. Paypal, YNAB, etc) so keep an eye out for emergent issues in those workflows as well.